Bloom’s Taxonomy – A better way to learn

Our CAL² methodology is based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. We believe that the success of a student’s learning is reflective of the quality of the teacher, as well as a effective teaching pedagogy and that’s why we use it. Interestingly, the Dean of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore mentions that Duke-NUS uses Bloom’s Taxonomy in their teaching as well.

In 1956, Dr Benjamin Bloom led a team of educational psychologists and educators to create a classification of the different types of learning objectives in education. In 2000, a student of his led another team to update and revise the taxonomy.

 

Bloom’s Taxonomy is divided into three domains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The three domains are sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively. Each domain is further divided into different categories, reflecting the general difficulty within each domain.

As an English school concentrating on bringing academic success to our students, we emphasis on the cognitive domain.

The first category is ‘remember‘. In essence, this means being able to recall facts. This the basis of all education.

The next category is ‘understand‘. This translates into able to comprehend information and re-state them.

Thirdly, it is ‘apply‘, where learnt knowledge is applied to new situations and circumstances.

‘Analyse‘ is the fourth category. This is where you break down information to its smaller components to analyse it.

The next category is ‘evaluate‘ where you make judgement of the knowledge or information.

The final category is ‘create‘. This entails building a pattern or a structure using diverse elements or different sources.

Why is using Bloom’s Taxonomy important?

It is important the ability to memorise, understand and apply facts is of limited use today – not only in institutions of higher learning, but also in the corporate world. Institutions and organisations value people who have critical thinking, people who can make use of their knowledge to infer, draw conclusions and solve problems.

Using Bloom ensures that RG Channel can target and measure these skills. We can design activities that will help our students reach and assess these levels of thinking.

An interesting side-effect of having these rigorous activities is that students learn better and achieve better results. I am sure many of us have heard of this:

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”